"What do you mean?" was the indignant inquiry.
"Why, you see, we got a tip from the house next door that somebody was murdering Wagner, and the chief sent me down here to work on the case."
Pianist Rachmaninoff told in his New York flat the other day a story about his boyhood.
"When I was a very little fellow," he said, "I played at a reception at a Russian count's, and, for an urchin of seven, I flatter myself that I swung through Beethoven's 'Kreutzer Sonata' pretty successfully.
"The 'Kreutzer,' you know, has in it several long and impressive rests. Well, in one of these rests the count's wife, a motherly old lady, leaned forward, patted me on the shoulder, and said:
"'Play us something you know, dear.'"
There was nobody who could play the violin like Smifkins—at least so he thought—and he was delighted when he was asked to play at a local function.
"Sir," he said to the host, "the instrument I shall use at your gathering is over two hundred years old."